WD's 1TB HDD creates problems

Yesterday
Western Digital announced a fairly cool 1TB 2.5-inch HDD and created a whole new problem
for those who want to upgrade their laptops.

Western Digital's Scorpio Blue
1-terabyte model, are huge and relatively cheap for the first time. Now it
is possible to buy a drive for $250 with more space than most consumer
laptop users will ever need. Other stuff in WD's range, like the 750GB
Scorpio Blue, which sells for a very reasonable $190. So with prices like
these has the day of the SSD arrived where the old hard drive is dead and
buried? Obviously not.

For ages pundits have been saying that SSDs will be the future. They
are silent, use less energy and have faster seek and read times. For a long
time they were very expensive and this had been the hurdle that many
analysts thought would be difficult to cross. Microsoft recently
announced it has fine-tuned Windows 7 to run faster on SSDs, although its
technology only works with the new SSDs.

It is also clear that despite SSD's
advantages the price difference is still too noticeable for mainstream,
consumer use. Intel
recently touted the affordability of its new series of X25-M SSDs. Yet its
160GB model costs $440 which is almost twice as much as the 1TB WD HDD. What's more, we're talking about 2.5-inch laptop drives here. The price difference compared to 3.5-inch dekstop drives is mind boggling, as you can get a 1TB HDD for just over $50. Basically you pay slightly over 5 cents per gigabyte, while the same amount of SSD storage will cost you more than $1.5.

At the moment
other drive makers seem happy with such high prices, and there's not much they can do about it. So, it might be a year
or two before SSD drives start to make the dramatic fall in price that will
force conventional hard drives out to pasture.